Respectable – Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man

"This important book provides an astute exploration of how Black institutions, responding to moral panics of Black male endangerment, advance limited and problematic models of Black masculinity, resulting in reactive respectability politics. This is an essential read for those interested in the work of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Black communities today."--Cathy J. Cohen, author of The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics

"A brilliant, courageous, carefully researched, sure to be controversial ethnographic study of Morehouse College's brand surrounding Black manhood, this timely portrait makes an important contribution to sociology, African American studies, women, gender and sexuality studies, and the evolving field of Black masculinities studies. It contributes as well to the scholarship on historically Black colleges, which has been paltry or lacking rigor. Analyzing our strengths and weaknesses is the best recipe for our survival and flourishing, not silence!"--Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Anna J. Cooper Professor of Women's Studies and Founding Director of the Women's Research and Resource Center, Spelman College

"I know of no other work that addresses contemporary respectability politics through the lens of higher education with such breadth: from the mundane schoolyard rituals that one might see at a prep school, to the question of how to 'deal with' gender-nonconforming students, to what to do about the problem of rape, to the question of how to promote our successful Black men and reinvigorate 'the brand.' This is a novel and necessary read."--Laurence Ralph, author of The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence

"With incisive breadth and analytical rigor, Saida Grundy unveils the motivations, mechanisms, and institutional processes that Morehouse College puts in play in order to maintain its brand by reproducing its go-to product: 'The Morehouse Man.'"--Karida L. Brown, coauthor of The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line